NEW YORK, NY.-Haunch of Venison presents a Project Room by Marlène Mocquet, featuring new work by the artist, including four paintings and two ceramic works. The exhibition runs through June 16th.

Mocquets paintings depict a fantastical world of animated and anthropomorphic creatures inhabiting a universe filled with hallucinogenic splashes of color. At first glance the works appear to portray a vision of whimsical fantasy, but upon further observation reveals a much darker more sinister existence. The beautiful realms Mocquet introduces are filled with menacing characters and macabre undertones set in a most beautifully tactile and opulent universe.

Mocquets paintings are an overflowing lush world inhabited by otherworldly beasts, manga and cartoon characters, and prehistoric imagery. However, it is not the characters that dictate Mocquets paintings but her instinctive and passionate use of material. As stated by Roberta Smith (New York Times, August 10, 2007)  she exploits paints possibilities with flair, working thick, then thin, dripping, pouring and staining. It is from these thick impasto-like layers of paint, alongside billowing clouds of glitter and lengthy drips of enamel that Mocquets imagery is born.

One of the highlights of the exhibition, Le Barrissement de la Peinture (The Trumpeting of the Paint), is a modest nine inches high and features a diaphanous figure gathering apples in a candy-colored landscape. Strange creatures surround the figure, one spewing paint into anothers throat through a long elephant-like trunk. The paint then gushes off the canvas. Wax, enamel, glitter and layer upon layer of paint enable Mocquet to achieve a highly tactile surface in which her figures take on a nearly sculptural quality. Her work, is both playful and grotesque, sharp and subtle, and warrants great inspection.